{"id":19691,"date":"2026-04-23T21:13:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T21:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=19691"},"modified":"2026-04-23T21:13:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T21:13:49","slug":"gender-lineage-and-racism-rachelle-mozman-solanos-casa-de-mujeres-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=19691","title":{"rendered":"Gender, Lineage, and Racism: Rachelle Mozman Solano\u2019s Casa de mujeres<\/em> Series"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the photograph before us, La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em> (The photography session, 2010), clever spotlighting favors a light-skinned young woman in a pale pink chiffon dress. Standing awkwardly behind her, the woman\u2019s twin sister, of notably darker complexion and wearing a pleated dress in striking magenta, affectionately embraces her sibling by the shoulder. To the right of them both, a housemaid\u2014dressed in an aged mustard uniform\u2014bears a silver tray with a sparkling necklace. The colors of the twins\u2019 clothing mimic those of the overall setting: a two-toned wall displays pink accents, a wooden pedestal supports a decorative copper vase, and a vintage camera is partly cropped by the photographer\u2019s tight frame. As it turns out, what we see in La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em> are the elements of no candid snapshot but a fictive photo shoot, wherein the sisters are being readied for a double family portrait\u2014their housemaid presumably destined to be left out of the picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rachelle Mozman Solano, La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em> (The photography session), 2010, chromogenic print, 23 x 26 inches (58.4 x 66\u2009cm) (artwork \u00a9 Rachelle Mozman Solano; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em> is the work of contemporary artist Rachelle Mozman Solano (b. 1972), who\u2014although born and based in New York\u2014created the puzzling image in Panama City. On closer inspection, it becomes evident that each of the characters inhabiting this picture is played by the artist\u2019s own mother, Mar\u00eda Teresa Solano (b. 1946). The uncanny element of repetition\u2014Mar\u00eda Teresa\u2019s simultaneously taking on the roles of housemaid and sisters\u2014may well haunt and disturb the viewer, as it elicits a compelling question: How can one woman inhabit three different identities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quizzical artwork that I have been describing is part of Mozman Solano\u2019s celebrated photographic series Casa de mujeres<\/em> (House of women, 2009\u201313). Over the course of forty distinct images, the series reenacts stories of intra-familial rivalries rooted in Panamanian class and racial difference. For the artist, the subject is a familiar one: As a young girl Mozman Solano heard these stories time and again from her mother\u2014a woman who grew up in the segregated Panama Canal Zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The modus operandi of La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em> is that of a \u201ctableau\u201d in the sense of the term\u2019s original art historical emergence. French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot (1713\u20131784) coined tableau<\/em> in the mid eighteenth century in reference to paintings in which the subjects were absorbed in their own world, walled off from the viewer (as in the theater), and yet projecting mesmerizing, narrative scenes that a beholder could hardly look away from.1<\/a><\/sup> While tableau painting was on the rise in eighteenth-century Europe, contemporary viceregal subjects in the Americas enjoyed a parallel trend in casta<\/em> (lineage) painting. Casta painting excelled in visualizing the racial mixtures of the New World based on a racial classification system introduced by Spanish colonialism\u2014an Enlightenment taxonomy aimed at classifying these mixtures into stock types.2<\/a><\/sup>La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em> engages both of these visual legacies, using the tableau to capture the viewer\u2019s attention and evincing the ghost of a racial caste system that remains, to this day, firmly entrenched in Central America. Mozman Solano\u2019s photograph likewise references a concrete historical site where the production of this kind of tableau was fostered: the portrait studio of Ecuadorian Carlos Endara Andrade (1865\u20131954), who after working for the French canal operation went on to found the most important photographic portrait studio in Panama City.3<\/a><\/sup> Endara photographed a diverse clientele in this international crossroads, from Chinese merchants and humble canal workers to elite families and sitting presidents. La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em> marks the one hundredth anniversary of Endara\u2019s studio and symbolically positions Mozman Solano\u2019s oeuvre at the crux of these transnational genealogies. The site-specificity of the photo shoot in this turn-of-the-century portrait studio implies a critique of the medium\u2019s proclivity towards visualizing family photography in decidedly racial terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The facade of Carlos Endara Andrade\u2019s photography studio, 1910, photograph (photograph provided by Museo Casa Endara, Panama City; published under fair use)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In this article I turn my attention to auto-ethnography as a method that shifts how we understand family photography. In his essay \u201cThe Artist as Ethnographer?\u201d (1995), art critic and historian Hal Foster tracked a paradigm shift in advanced art of the 1990s, where a quasi-anthropological model interested in the \u201ccultural and\/or ethnic other\u201d came to replace a former focus on the proletariat by artists on the left.4<\/a><\/sup> Foster cautioned artists how this practice could engage the \u201cprimitivist fantasy\u201d of avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, which claimed anticolonial positions but saw the non-white subject as a purveyor of \u201cprimal psychic and social processes\u201d (allegedly inaccessible to the white bourgeoisie).5<\/a><\/sup> Art historians Derek Conrad Murray and Soraya Murray have deftly demonstrated how the weight of Foster\u2019s theory crumbles when meticulously analyzed for its ideological concerns.6<\/a><\/sup> Whereas Foster sees the extreme ethnographic turn as a \u201cpractice of narcissistic self-refurbishing\u201d by the artist, the Murrays point to a marked difference when the artist identifies as an ethnographer of their own culture. To assume that this self-othering is somehow a form of navel gazing is one thing, but the Murrays show that locating the work within anthropology rather than art history is a form of epistemic violence that renders the art of women, queer, and POC (people of color) artists as extraneous to the canon, in fact even completely outside its purview as a result of its engagement with questions of identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ethnographic eye has certainly produced problematic and uneven encounters with \u201cethnic others\u201d in the history of photography in Latin America, but what happens when the subject is the photographer\u2019s own mother and the site is the artist\u2019s ancestral homeland? How does this contiguity between artist and subject blur traditionally presumed boundaries existing between them? What are the ways in which this contiguity engages the tropes of ethnography and also undoes the field\u2019s claims to objectivity? The Casa de mujeres<\/em> series may hint at how in some sense we are all ethnographers of our kin\u2014we study our familial relations intensely since birth, especially that relation we share with our mothers, indeed as if our life depended on it. On close examination, it becomes clear that Mozman Solano engages auto-ethnography in this series as a research method to more fully understand her mother and the family lore that animates her mother\u2019s intimate stories. While a prior reading of this series framed these works through the lens of melodrama akin to the telenovela genre, I propose there is more at play in these photographic reenactments.7<\/a><\/sup> Mozman Solano\u2019s Casa de mujeres<\/em> series places women at the center of reproducing genealogies of race, and shows how the pigmentocracies that we remain beholden to are in fact a family matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ghost in the Maternal<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In her book Ghostly Matters<\/em> (2008), sociologist Avery Gordon proposes that \u201chaunting is a constituent element of modern social life,\u201d and thus to study social life, \u201cone must confront the ghostly aspects of it.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> According to Gordon, \u201cThe ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to a dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> In keeping with this reading, the social figure of the mother animates the site of history in a place marked by colonial violence, subjugation, racism, and death. Mozman Solano\u2019s series may be understood along such lines: Rather than focus on the structural factors that create those conditions of coloniality, Casa de mujeres<\/em> draws attention to the subjective experiences of these systems, suggesting that the wounds that appear to haunt these photographs are something \u201cpartial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, ambiguous.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> In the timeless invocations of colonialist fantasies in these images, the viewer is asked to interpret: What is ghosting these images?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mozman Solano recently published many of the images from the Casa de mujeres<\/em> series in a photobook titled Colonial Echo<\/em> (2020), where the series\u2019s photographs appear alongside interviews and genuine family snapshots.11<\/a><\/sup> The first such interview in the book is conducted by the artist\u2019s mother, Mar\u00eda Teresa, interviewing her own mother (Mozman Solano\u2019s maternal grandmother), Carmen Thatcher de Solano. The interview dates from 1981, just months before Carmen\u2019s death. Carmen reflects on the difficulties her family faced, such as the poverty they endured, but a larger subject\u2014it resurfaces again and again\u2014is the topic of various family members\u2019 phenotype, and skin color. Art historian Tatiana Flores has written on how \u201canti-Black racism is ubiquitous in Latin America and commonplace in Latinx communities, even in those with Afro-descendant roots,\u201d which Flores attributes to the region\u2019s embrace of a European construct of latinidad<\/em> (shared identity).12<\/a><\/sup> Carmen mentions that her aunt Manuela was married to a man from Panama who was \u201cthe son of Americans . . . white, with blue eyes but tough hair.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> Mar\u00eda Teresa inquires about Carmen\u2019s own mother\u2019s skin: \u201cWasn\u2019t your mother trigue\u00f1a<\/em> (olive skinned)?\u201d Carmen prosaically responds, \u201cShe was white. She was like Rachelle\u2019s color, Rachelle\u2019s skin type.\u201d In an annotation accompanying the interview transcript, Mozman Solano recalls that she was a young girl playing nearby as this conversation took place on the porch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interview is revealing for a number of reasons. For one, it documents an oral history tradition, which Mozman Solano has continued with her own mother (as the reader of the book learns in a subsequent interview). The interview between the artist\u2019s mother and maternal grandmother also foregrounds how the machinations of race on the Panamanian isthmus shape family relations, as well as how related beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes are passed down from mothers to daughters through stories, silences, and gestures. The men among the family were not immune to this phenomenon: In another part of the interview, Carmen talks about her paternal grandfather, who served as governor of the Panama Canal, but whom\u2014despite his distinguished position\u2014could not accept her father, who was born to an Afro-Panamanian woman. She concludes in a strident tone, \u201cI have erased the past from my mind, I don\u2019t want any contact with my family.\u201d While the comment speaks to the hurt caused by this negation of blackness, Carmen\u2019s instinct to erase the memory, rather than confront it, speaks to the ways in which this history is repressed yet nonetheless continues to haunt the everyday life of the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To return to La sesi\u00f3n fotogr\u00e1fica<\/em>, it now becomes clear that to take in this image, indeed with all its apparent disjunctions, is to bear witness to the ways in which race, class, and color have shaped Panamanian relationships\u2014not only in the public commons, but inside the home. The stark racial differences between the idealized whiteness of the light-skinned sister, the darker skin tone of her sibling, and the racialized otherness of the housemaid are performed through Mozman Solano\u2019s mother as profoundly embodied behaviors and attitudes. Such behaviors and attitudes are even\u2014as we eventually learn\u2014further purposely exposed by the artist via techniques of digital brownface and, on the opposite side of the spectrum, artificial whitening. Here it is important to distinguish Mozman Solano\u2019s use of brownface from the tradition of racial ridicule, such as that of the American actor and comedian, Bill Dana (1924\u20132017), in his late 1950s creation of the Latino buffoon character, Jos\u00e9 Jim\u00e9nez.14<\/a><\/sup> Sociologist Ra\u00fal P\u00e9rez argues that at a time when Black minstrelsy had become socially unacceptable, white performers turned to brownface to continue a racist comedic tradition that gave white audiences a feeling of superiority, specifically by relying on cultural, linguistic, and nationalistic markers. P\u00e9rez explains, \u201cby performing an incompetent, working-class, Latino immigrant for a largely Anglo-American audience, Dana, of Hungarian-Jewish descent, was becoming a national celebrity in \u2018brownface.\u2019\u201d15<\/a><\/sup> P\u00e9rez further points out that in the wake of America\u2019s Civil Rights Movement (ca. 1954\u20131968), both Black and brown minstrelsy became unacceptable for white performers, and \u201cthis gap was filled by non-whites mocking themselves.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> For many Latinx performers, this self-deprecating humor is also a way to undo the power of a racial stereotype. But in the case of Mozman Solano\u2019s Casa de mujeres<\/em>, given that the element of skin tinting is not meant to invoke comedic relief, the photographs are both striking and unsettling. Their aim is to create a contradictory dramatic effect that speaks to the nuances of racial formation as matters in which the women in the family play a central role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the striking features of the series is the subtle critique of her mother\u2019s trauma. In the realm of psychoanalysis, the imago<\/em> (likeness) is theorized as an idealized image of our parents formed in early childhood.17<\/a><\/sup> But here the artist seems to question the idealization, and to search for something hidden in the maternal object. Clinical psychologist Jill Salberg explains how transgenerational trauma is not necessarily relayed through content but moves within affective registers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a parent has experienced a trauma, part of their mind and body has been affected, along with their ability to self-regulate emotions. Thus, some part of a person may not be knowable to themselves, dissociated and inaccessible. Some part of this unmediated experience will likely be transmitted transgenerationally from parent to child. Children are constant observers of their parents, noticing when a parent is attuned, misattuned and\/or psychically absent. In response, children adjust and adapt to the emotional presence and absence of their caregivers.<\/strong>18<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The creative space of reenactment enabled a search for these unknowable parts of things that haunted Mozman Solano\u2019s mother. The photographic sessions were thus intersubjective to hold space for her mother to repeat and rework, but also to witness the trauma transmissions in the photographer\u2019s own family. In an interview with curator Leslie Moody Castro, Mozman Solano talked about what compelled her to make the series:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My mom is from Panama, and I really wanted the work to be focused on Central America and the environments and backgrounds to be colonial homes. She was my first subject, really the first person I pointed the camera at and was like, \u201coh, there\u2019s something really deep here.\u201d I think it was that she was my biggest enigma. I just could not understand my mother. So I feel like a lot of my work with her is about trying to understand her. She\u2019s just very enigmatic, odd, and eccentric and traumatized.<\/strong>19<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After completing her MFA at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture in 1998, Mozman Solano embarked on a new challenge by undergoing coursework and clinical practice in psychoanalysis at The Training Institute of the National Psychological Association of Psychoanalysis (NPAP), New York. She explained, \u201cI [saw] patients for seven years, and I think it really affected my work.\u201d20<\/a><\/sup> The established dialogue between psychoanalysis and photography was a natural draw for the artist. The effect of psychoanalytic training and clinical practice on her artistic practice hints at Mozman Solano\u2019s singular ability to imagine the scenes that her patients described to her in vivid detail as if she could see or inhabit them in her dreams. On activating her imaginative capacity and deploying it in her creative practice, Mozman Solano has commented, \u201cIt\u2019s [a matter of] listening to people, and then sort of traveling with them through their psychic experiences.\u201d21<\/a><\/sup> That said, we might yet ask what is at stake in having her mother, Mar\u00eda Teresa, perform this trauma for the sake of art. Moreover, is there something perverse about reenacting brutal human relationships and taking pleasure\u2014artist-photographer, portrait actor, audience\u2014in the performance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One clue about the psychological transmissions taking place during these photoshoots comes from developmental psychoanalysis. In tracing the affective communication between mothers and infants, scholars have shown that the \u201cgaze represents the most intense form of interpersonal communication, and the perception of facial expressions is known to be the most salient channel of nonverbal communication.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> Whether attuned to produce a positive affect or attuned to induce stress, the gaze mediates this early bond which is crucial for psychological development, indeed eventually facilitating the infant\u2019s ability to grow into an adult who can effectively regulate their emotions. It is as if the artist-daughter reverses the usual trajectory of that dyad by turning her lens back upon her subject-mother retrospectively, indeed to reclaim early experiences from the deep unconscious. The camera acts as a witness to nonverbal transference (Mar\u00eda Teresa\u2019s feelings toward Rachelle) and countertransference (Rachelle\u2019s feelings toward her mother). There is no pretense to objectivity when Mozman Solano is both daughter and therapist in these scenarios, and yet what the participants are able to generate collaboratively in these photographs is a system for representing split-off parts of the self of a larger pathology that belongs to both of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Luis Gispert, Bedroom<\/em>, 2003, chromogenic print, 40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127\u2009cm) (artwork \u00a9 Luis Gispert; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mozman Solano is part of a generation of photographers, including Sarah Jones (b. 1959), Deana Lawson (b. 1979), and Luis Gispert (b. 1972), who are resolutely meticulous in their formal experimentation with their chosen photographic settings and framing techniques, and who similarly employ actors in creating the arresting poses and compositions. But in Mozman Solano\u2019s turn to her mother and auto-ethnography as subjects for her investigative lense, she shares something with the approach of Gispert, whose photograph of his mother offers a similarly acerbic yet loving portrayal. For example, the Cuban American photographer\u2019s life-sized C-print tableau Bedroom<\/em> (2003) is a portrait of the artist\u2019s mother seated on a bed and holding a pose of devout prayer. She is dressed in an ornate lilac dress with gold trim, and she wears a veil while gazing toward the ceiling, bathed in spotlighting that illuminates her presence as no less than angelic. The bedroom emanates a warm soft light, and careful attention to symmetry and balance has allowed the artist to frame a baroque bedroom scene. The plunging geometry of the wooden floor draws the eye powerfully into the strange mise en sc\u00e8ne: a sleigh bed framed by lamps, religious symbols, equestrian statues, framed pictures, decorative clocks, and voluminous drapery\u2014an excess of objects that theatrically, and perhaps stereotypically, sheds light on the cultural aesthetics associated with Cuban immigrants. Aligned with this tongue-in-cheek portrayal of his mother, Gispert has placed an extravagantly large 1980s boom box at her feet, almost as if it represented an offering to the Virgin Mother. Despite its exceedingly modest cast, the tableau envelops the viewer in a scene where the hip-hop of his youth sonically moves the picture forward in time, and the mother remains in a frozen, pious, and muted pose as embodying a figure of the past\u2014a ghost that cannot cross over to the contemporary moment. There is love and contempt in nearly equal measure in such a portrayal that viewers might well question not only the artist and mother\u2019s bond, but also how the personal translates into larger questions of cultural and social meaning. Similarly, the politics of race that play out in Casa de mujeres<\/em>\u2014stories of class privilege and live-in servants, colonial homes filled with curious objects, and sibling rivalries based on colorism\u2014address the various colonial and imperial incursions in Panama (which I will briefly rehearse for the reader), but they do so from a subjective viewpoint where the colonial wound doubles as the mother wound. Casa de mujeres<\/em> engages in a ritual of \u201cremembering, repeating, and working through\u201d to bring the forgotten into consciousness.23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mirrors and Hauntings in the Canal Zone<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Across the multiple images that make up Mozman Solano\u2019s Casa de mujeres<\/em> series, the mirror proves an exceptionally important component. In El espejo<\/em> (The mirror, 2010), for example, the lady of the house (la dama<\/em>) and her maid are placed in close proximity to a baroque full-length mirror. The maid is dusting an antique clock that rests on a marble table bearing the weight of the mirror. While the lady of the house stands in the foreground, her body is turned away from the camera lens as she faces herself in the mirror. La dama adjusts her hair and gazes upon her silken red dress as sunlight streams in from the windows. Notably, while the maid also faces away from the camera and has been posed by the artist in the privileged, central zone of the picture (where Diderot would have been expecting to find climactic action), she does not appear in the mirror\u2014save for her feet. Rather, she twists her body toward us\u2014as though to side-eye the camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

El espejo<\/em> invites a number of psychoanalytic readings in which Mozman Solano\u2019s mother fractures into doubles, as in a dream or a hallucination. The symbolic role of the mirror recalls the early \u201cmirror stage\u201d of Jacques Lacan (1901\u20131981), that developmental moment when an infant gazes in the mirror and assumes, for the very first time, an image of the self apart from the world around them.24<\/a><\/sup> The function of this mental image is to establish a new relationship between the infant and external reality. But as Lacan noted, \u201cThe mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation\u2014and for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body . . . an \u2018orthopedic\u2019 form of its totality.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup> The specular image constitutes an \u201cI\u201d that is haunted by the fragmented body or an incohesive image of the self. As such El espejo<\/em> may invoke a collective reckoning, particularly for Panamanian viewers, who are invited to see themselves in this tableau, through a master-slave, white-colored dichotomy. In such a work Mozman Solano holds up a mirror to an elite sector of Panamanian society and speaks to its racial unconscious girding their idealized white identity in opposition to indigenous and Black subjects, the latter\u2019s abjection an imperative for the construction of this subjectivity. And yet the fact that her mother inhabits both roles here suggests that her character is not a racially cohesive subject, but one that has internalized a fractured identity based on these colonial projections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rachelle Mozman Solano, El espejo<\/em> (The mirror), 2010, chromogenic print, 22 x 19 in. (56 x 48.3\u2009cm) (artwork \u00a9 Rachelle Mozman Solano; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The mirror is also a metaphor for the camera lens through which Mozman Solano hopes viewers will critically engage\u2014by way of this series of images\u2014Panama\u2019s internalized racial hierarchies. These social stratifications were intertwined with the country\u2019s ascent as a major hub of interoceanic and intercontinental transportation. From the earliest European-led explorations, the isthmus was regarded as key to connecting South America to the Atlantic Ocean. The first interoceanic land route, a fifty-mile cobblestone road known as El Camino Real, was built by slaves to transport gold and silver destined for the Spanish Crown. The Spanish explorer Vasco Nu\u00f1ez de Balboa (1475\u20131519) is purported to have brought enslaved Africans to the region as early as 1513, but within a decade many of them would flee to found maroon communities. These communities staged defensive and offensive actions that forced the Spanish to issue a decree and grant their permanent freedom in 1579.26<\/a><\/sup> However, the slave trade continued even as the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada (later Gran Colombia) gained independence from Spain in 1821. Slavery was subsequently officially abolished in Colombia thirty years later. In the United States, following the annexation of Oregon (1846) and the discovery of gold in California (1848), American businessman William Aspinwall secured a formal contract (1850) to build an \u201ciron road\u201d across Panama, as well as to construct multiple lines of steamships under the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for speeding up travel routes. These transportation developments, coupled with the French initial attempt to build the canal (under entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, from 1880 to 1889), also brought a large number of Black West Indian laborers from the Anglophone Caribbean, namely from Jamaica and Barbados. The influx of West Indian immigrant Blacks created tensions with preexisting groups, including the slave-descended Afro-Hispanic populations.27<\/a><\/sup> As legal historian Robert Cottrol has noted, \u201cThe desire of political leaders to create white societies often clashed with the wishes of foreign-owned enterprises for cheap labor.\u201d28<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hierarchies of race and labor became further complicated when the US became involved in Panama. In November 1903 Panama declared independence from Colombia with the help of the United States; soon after, negotiations led to the enactment of the Panama Canal Treaty (1903) that granted the US control in perpetuity over 533 square miles of the zone. Scholar Katherine Zien argues that performance allowed the treaty\u2019s redefinition of sovereignty, by which she means that Panama retained sovereignty while the US could perform sovereign acts in the zone, leading to a legal borderland, a labor colony, and a new system of racial segregation.29<\/a><\/sup> The US construction of the canal from 1904 to 1914 brought somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 Caribbean migrants from Barbados, as well as Jamaica, Saint Lucia, and Martinique. Notably, canal authorities assigned each worker to a gold or silver roll according to their race, with white workers earning higher wages, vacations, and pensions, and instituting Jim Crow\u2013like separate towns, schools, recreational facilities, and transportation, to keep the workers from mixing.30<\/a><\/sup> In order to accomplish what the French had failed to, the Americans drained swamps, killed swarms of mosquitoes, built schools and hospitals, and instituted a police force.31<\/a><\/sup> The work conditions for what were mostly immigrant laborers were treacherous; under intense heat or punishing rain, these men cut\u2014with dynamite, picks, and steam shovels\u2014a trench fifty miles long and ten miles wide through mountainous terrain for about ten cents an hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harris & Ewing Inc., Panama Canal<\/em>, 1913, digital print from glass plate negative 5 x 7 in. (12.7 x 17.8\u2009cm), Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC-H261-3017 (photograph \u00a9 and provided by Library of Congress)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Most commentators today still laud the canal as an engineering marvel, as it greatly reduced shipping routes across the globe. But Panama\u2019s dream of becoming a central nexus for commercial trade was doubtless hampered by the US Government\u2019s retaining political and economic control of the canal through the late 1990s.32<\/a><\/sup> These are the structural inequalities that ruled the public sphere in Panama, but tracing their wounds is much harder. Historian Kaysha Corinealdi explains, \u201cThe violence of this building effort marked entire generations.\u201d33<\/a><\/sup> Mozman Solano\u2019s Casa de mujeres<\/em> invokes this troubled history by dwelling on its mark on the family, and interrogating how women have had a role in enabling this brutalization\u2014even when it was to their own detriment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By learning of her familial ancestors through auto-ethnography, Mozman Solano has been able to identify members of her extended family who have rubbed elbows with power in recent history. Her maternal grandfather, Enrique Solano y Rafecas (ca. 1886\u20131953), was a medical doctor whose patients included the infamous three-time president of the republic of Panama, Arnulfo Arias (1901\u20131988).34<\/a><\/sup> During his first brief presidential term of 1940\u20131941, Arias experienced a bout of testicular cancer, and Mozman Solano\u2019s grandfather was the attending surgeon. As the artist recently explained, \u201cMy grandfather [subsequently] paid a real price for that . . . [as] he was banished to the countryside.\u201d35<\/a><\/sup> The vernacular phrase, \u201cUna bola de Arias,\u201d which Panamanians would then jocularly use to order a scoop of ice cream, made light of the situation, effectively poking fun at the hard right policies that characterized Arias\u2019s administration. Arias rose to prominence with a right-wing campaign based on a growing nationalist movement of Paname\u00f1ismo<\/em> (Panamanianism), resulting in the modification of the Panamanian constitution in 1941, one of the effects of which was to effectively (and retroactively) denationalize Afro-Caribbean Panamanians\u2014thereby stripping them of citizenship. In his first presidential inaugural address in the early autumn of 1940, Arias framed Panama\u2019s underdevelopment as a consequence of its \u201cethnic problem.\u201d36<\/a><\/sup> The new social order that was to be imposed internally through gender and racial segregation, coupled with the performance of sovereignty over the region by the United States, would have lasting consequences. Evolving in tandem, they gave rise to far right leaders who fomented xenophobic rhetoric; at the same time, this internal-external dynamic effectively served to internalize the ghost that is racism, a ghost that psychologically fractures, if not devastates, the self\u2014as we have seen in the incohesive image of El espejo<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tableau photography of Jeff Wall (b. 1946) serves as a productive comparison here. In Wall\u2019s After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue<\/em> (1999\u20132000), Wall (and his assistants) staged an elaborate scene where the protagonist of Ellison\u2019s celebrated novel sits in an overcrowded basement. The large-scale lightbox transparency shows a modest dwelling that includes a twin bed, a record player, two chairs, a dresser, and a makeshift kitchen. Seated on a folding chair, the solitary protagonist looks away from the camera, presumably focused on drying the cookware in his hand. In the 1952 novel, Ellison tells the story of a young Black man struggling with the hardships of racial segregation and the pain of feeling invisible. In a basement where he lives and writes, he finds comfort in light: \u201cPerhaps you\u2019ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.\u201d37<\/a><\/sup> This fascination with light and its ability to give form is a central theme of the photograph. Hundreds of incandescent lightbulbs illuminate the basement. While some of the bulbs have burned out, the cascading and undulating rhythms of bulbs and their burning light renders the space warm and inviting. The sensuous glow bathes virtually everything in its path, from felt to cardboard, flesh to metal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is perhaps the quasi-anthropological model that Foster had warned against, to enter the realm of that \u201ccultural and\/or ethnic other\u201d in the production of a fantasy\u2014even if based on fiction. Art historian R\u00e9gis Michel has written on the ways that Wall \u201cbetrays Ellison,\u201d by showing a Black man \u201cwith the eyes of the white,\u201d calling out a \u201cphotopantomime\u201d of racism that veers on \u201cendless narcissism.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Mozman Solano, her auto-ethnography series does create living pictures<\/em>, however these are not simulations in the Baudrillardian sense. They tap into a lived experience (her mother is not an actor but a retired schoolteacher) and are further animated by the mise en sc\u00e8ne of existing historical sites. El espejo,<\/em> for example, was taken in the colonial home of President Ernesto Tisdel Lefevre (in office 1920) in the historic district of Panama City. The tableaus in Casa de mujeres<\/em> are interpretations which at times draw upon her specialization in psychoanalysis to approach her mother\u2019s trauma, and perhaps her own intergenerational trauma, with compassion and curiosity. They likewise show the beholder the photographer\u2019s \u201csecond sight,\u201d her physical presence in these colonial interiors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jeff Wall, After \u201cInvisible Man\u201d by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue<\/em>, 1999\u20132000, silver dye bleach transparency, aluminum light box, 5\u2009ft. 8\u00bd in. x 8\u2009ft. 2\u00be in. (174 x 250.8\u2009cm), The Photography Council Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel and acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Carol and David Appel, The Museum of Modern Art, New York\/Licensed by SCALA\/Art Resource, NY.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The blurring of boundaries between maker and subject, to further erode any sense of objectivity, appear in instances where Mozman Solano inserts herself into these photographs.39<\/a><\/sup> In El sill\u00f3n<\/em> (The armchair, 2011), a maid and a young schoolgirl sit together in a large wicker chair. The pieta-like pose, loosely reminiscent of Michelangelo\u2019s carved marble Piet\u00e0<\/em> (1498\u20131500), represents the artist reclining while the maid\u2014once again, her own mother\u2014affectionately cradles her body. There is a notable difference between the porcelain skin of the young girl and the brown skin tone of the maid, whose bare feet rest on the tile floor. A series of family photographs are hanging on the wall behind them, and some other furniture is visible, though judging by its modesty, the sitters are probably in the maid\u2019s quarters. El sill\u00f3n<\/em> hints at the emotional bonds that connect maids and the children of their employers. This mothering provided by maids to their employer\u2019s children is often rendered at the expense of their own young ones. Ironically, children of the wealthy will learn about racial bias from an early age while they will nonetheless love these women, indeed sometimes more than their own parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rachelle Mozman Solano, El sill\u00f3n<\/em> (The armchair), 2011, chromogenic print, 22 x 19 in. (55.9 x 48.3\u2009cm) (artwork \u00a9 Rachelle Mozman Solano; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, the mirror plays into the photographer\u2019s sleight of hand. One might expect the artist, camera, and tripod to appear in Pintando las u\u00f1as<\/em> (Doing their nails, 2011), and yet there is no trace of their presence. The vanishing from the picture plane of such images lends insight into Mozman Solano\u2019s process. These are not simply staged photographs but constructed<\/em> images initially shot on film, but then digitally manipulated, one layer after another, to create seamless montages. In this scene, the maid kneels before the twins and paints the nails of the fair-skinned sister. The other waits her turn, while reading a celebrity gossip magazine. To achieve such a composite would require the artist to photograph her mother at least three times in these different poses and costumes, in addition to photographing the mise en sc\u00e8ne looking both towards and away from the bed. The mirror is, then, a window for the viewer to explore, identify, or disidentify with these social relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rachelle Mozman Solano, Pintando las u\u00f1as<\/em> (Doing their nails), 2011, chromogenic print, 26 x 23 in. (66 x 58.4\u2009cm) (artwork \u00a9 Rachelle Mozman Solano; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Who Rules the Private Sphere?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In order to expand her critique to the entire Central American region, Mozman Solano chose multiple sites throughout the isthmus, including some in Guatemala and Nicaragua. The photographs from Guatemala City\u2019s historic center are particularly lavish in capturing the wealth accumulation and aesthetic splendor of the Republican era. In El cuarto de la ni\u00f1a<\/em> (The girl\u2019s room, 2010), an elaborate nineteenth-century period room comes to life through a tightly framed tableau in which la dama sits on a mahogany bed.40<\/a><\/sup> Sitting beneath a light fixture, the subject, dressed in a pink silk dress, looks pensively toward the ground. Her reflection is visible in a mirror mounted on the wall, and the fairness of her skin mimics a porcelain doll that rests on a bed pillow. The dark-skinned maid stands directly behind her, looking toward the floor, submissively. Her placement at an angle creates a chevron shape between the maid, la dama, and the idealized white figure in the mirror from darkness to light. This masterful use of chiaroscuro, not unlike in Wall\u2019s tableau of a Black man polishing his kitchenware beneath a resplendently lit basement ceiling, provides embodiment of the time\u2019s racial hierarchies. Mozman Solano\u2019s mise en sc\u00e8ne likewise conjures this tonal range and points to a colonialist nostalgia with an excessive feminine aesthetic that camouflages every domestic surface, from the flowery wallpaper to the lace pillowcase to the mahogany armoire topped with delicate glassware. In such a tableau viewers are enveloped in a drama that unveils the usually invisible machinations of race, including how women have played their own part in enforcing racial hierarchies in the domestic sphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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